Murals That Inspire Awe

Tao and the art of Yongle Palace, a rare Chinese survivor

By

Ian Johnson

Updated March 5, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

Ruicheng, China

For aficionados of Chinese art, the murals in the Yongle Palace have a special cachet.

Dating to the 14th century, they fill three halls in a Taoist temple complex with deities and scenes from everyday life, a swirling mélange of gods, demons and people. And their scale makes them awe-inspiring: Covering more than 4,300 square feet, they form the biggest single ensemble of murals in the country.

In China's Temple of Eternal Happiness is a stunning, ancient wall mural seen by few people because of its remote location in rural Shanxi province.

"These are 200 years earlier than the Sistine Chapel and on a comparable scale," says Stephen Little, a scholar of Taoist art and director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

But despite their repute, few people have seen the murals. The temple is almost impossible to reach without special effort. Its odd history has also added to its obscurity: It was moved from its original location to protect it from a huge dam project, but that made it ineligible for the tourist-boosting designation as a United Nations world heritage site. The upshot for those who do get here is a work of art in superb condition. Officials say they get just 30,000 visitors a year, and on a recent day the temple was all but deserted except for a group of art students.

The palace is a temple that honors one of China's most popular gods, Lü Dongbin. Famous for his morality and acerbic wit, Lü became known also as an immortal prankster, turning up in disguise to test locals' piety. By the 12th century, he was a leading god in the Taoist pantheon and his hometown, Yongle, became the site of a small temple.

At the time, Yongle was a wealthy trading town at the foot of an important mountain pass and a key crossing of the mighty Yellow River. It had been home to a prosperous merchant class and a growing number of Taoists. By 1345, they gave the now-important god the temple he deserved and constructed the palace, a series of three halls set in the foothills of the Zhongtiao mountains.

The halls are rare examples of architecture from the Yuan Dynasty. Chinese architecture is largely wood, so relatively little has survived its millennia of history. But the area around Yongle is dry, so the buildings didn't rot and are largely original. The structures look different from the ones that most tourists see, such as the Forbidden City in Beijing. Those buildings lack the massive, imposing roofs or flattened stone lions that grace the Yongle Palace. Most have also been renovated so often that little appears original; the Yongle Palace, by contrast, has a wind-weathered authentic feel to it.

But the real masterpieces are inside. Like the stained glass in medieval Christian churches, the palace's murals are meant to impose but also to teach. The first building, the Hall of the Three Pure Ones, is the largest and most awe-inspiring. It contains numerous gods in the Taoist pantheon, which makes it a cornucopia of Chinese figurative painting. Here are serene goddesses, obedient attendants and argumentative followers. Several men seem engaged in a heated discussion; two men lock eyes in debate, while others strike poses of contemplation and detachment.

Probably the temple's most famous image is from this hall: the Queen Mother of the West, one of Taoism's most popular goddesses. She stands serenely in flowing robes, a crown on her head adorned with the symbol for kun, or female.

ENLARGE

Queen Mother of the West, from the Hall of the Three Pure Ones.
Liu Zhongkai

Gods are an important part of Taoism, which is based on the worship of the Tao, or Way, the primordial life force that unites humans and nature and is the DNA of Chinese culture. The goal is immortality by melding with the Tao, which can be achieved by study, meditation and physical self-cultivation. These goals are complemented by a lively worship of gods who symbolize different facets of the theology.

This becomes clearer in the next building, the Hall of Pure Yang, which is devoted to Lü. The 2,200-square-foot mural shows scenes of the god's life, and includes captions that explain the stories, such as one of Taoism's most famous, the Dream of Yellow Millet. In it, Lü falls asleep while cooking his millet and dreams of a career in officialdom in which he reaches the pinnacle of earthly success and then is disgraced. About to die of hunger on the street, he wakes up to see that his millet is not yet ready—and realizes that human existence is equally short and fleeting. He gives up temporal life and follows the Tao.

For today's viewers, the paintings also give a glimpse of that era's architecture, clothing, food and dress, as does the last hall, the Hall of Redoubled Yang. The walls here are given over to the life of Wang Chongyang, who founded the School of Complete Perfection, the dominant school of monastic Taoism today.

Until about 20 years ago, few people studied China's only indigenous religion, fewer still its art and architecture. That's slowly changing with the creation of Chinese religious studies in Chinese and Western universities—in fact, the palace's history and paintings are the subject of a book, "Images of the Immortal," by the Taiwan-based U.S. academic Paul R. Katz. Along with a new tunnel being bored through the Zhongtiao mountains, these developments are making it easier to reach—and appreciate—the temple.

"The Yongle Palace is like an echo of things that had to have existed in China but which did not survive the Mongol invasion," says Prof. Little. "By the early 20th century they were pretty much unique."

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